To Die, To Sleep…

I saw my heart on the screen,
the palpitations of my life.
The engine of my soul.
There, over my body,
among the porcelain finish of steel.
The hunched shoulders of a surgeon
and his assistant.
Disjointed words back and forth
in the careful calibration of
catheter and dye.

I was not tranquilized into peace.
I knew with certainty that everything
I loved,
was in the balance of their hands.
That all the flashing thoughts
inside my brain
could switch off like a lamp,
not into darkness, but into nothing.
So my world would end.

No time to swim in resignation,
to waste my feelings in fear.
I had no crown of thorns
around my head,
I felt only sympathy and attachment
to these people keeping me alive.
I loved them because they were the nearest
people I would ever know now.
Like a crawfish,
I was approaching death backward.
I wanted my eyes to see them.
My ears to hear them.
My heart to go from me to them.

It was, what was left.
My last treasure.
It is what I know now.
Without explanation,
fate opened and closed its eyelids
and said,
not now,
another time.